take the matter in the concrete.

We look back to-day on a long series of processes and circumstances
which culminate in the war. There is the whole history of Germany for a
hundred and fifty years inspiring the German people with a bias toward
aggressive war; there are the economic and geographical circumstances
which, at the end of the nineteenth century, begin to make it think
again of aggressive war; there is the overflowing population, bred by
order of the clergy who stupidly condemn an artificial restriction of
births; there is the coincident trouble of Austria with the Slavs, of
England with its subject peoples, and so on. In the eyes of the careful
student a hundred lines of circumstance and development have led to this
war. The melodramatic idea that it all springs from the free will of the
Kaiser, or of a group of soldiers and statesmen, need not be seriously
considered. Moreover, even when we introduce the personal element--and
the personality of the Kaiser has had a very considerable influence--it
is foolish to throw the whole burden on free will. The mood and outlook
and ambition of the Kaiser take their colour from his notoriously morbid
nervous frame. In a word, you have a mighty concurrence of movements,
whether acts of will or otherwise, converging in all parts of Europe
toward this war. Was God indifferent to the whole of those movements?

Those movements are particularly traceable in Europe during the last
fourteen years. Before that there was a similar concurrence of movements
eventuating in the South African War; and in the meantime a series of
processes and circumstances had given us the Russo-Japanese War and the
Balkan-Turkish War and the Mexican War. So we might go over the wars of
the nineteenth century and all earlier wars. The "permissiveness" or
indifference of the ruler of the universe grows amazingly. In the
meantime we had mighty catastrophes like the sinking of the _Titanic_